Tired thoughts

What a day. Had five hours of work, ostensibly on the SCOTS machines...but after I got on, I found that only three of the four terminals were actually working, a number which soon fell to two, and then one as the darned Windows-powered boxes crashed hard, like hardly crashing things, and refused to start back up again. The supervisors called the headquarters to describe the problem, and got a terse "we're investigating it" in response. Apparently it might be some sort of network problem, and we were not the only store so affected. At last, after I got off my break, they gave up, closed the SCOTS entirely, and put me on a regular register, the better to serve the customers who were starting to get frustrated at lack of open lines.

I've heard some rumors lately that a lot of the street lights in the north part of town aren't working properly, and haven't been for the last few days. I wonder if it could somehow be related? Eh, probably not.

Tomorrow, I have a five and a half hour day. Yay. Long enough to be an awful drain, but just barely short enough that I don't get to take a full half-hour lunch to recuperate. Just one little fifteen minute break in the middle. I hate those.

Lately, on the impetus of some discussions I've had with a friend, I've turned my attention back to reading the pulps. Doc Savage, The Shadow...it's amazing what you can find on-line. There's this one e-book site, Black Mask, that has an amazing quantity of e-books in its Pulp Fiction section. Apparently the companies that owned the properties didn't properly renew the copyrights, so the books are in the public domain. And they're already pre-formatted for reading in HTML, PDF, Rocketbook, or Palm (via iSilo or Mobipocket). Neat stuff. It's funny to look at the webpage and realize that I've got sufficient reading material for probably the next several years there. And all of it free!

Well, I'd better post this and get ready for bed. Tomorrow is another day, and it'll come whether I want it to or not.

A wearing day

Home again, finally. The 5.5 hours of work turned into 4.75 hours, because I asked to take off early so I could go to the rental place to rent a shop vac.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. My toilet overflowed today, as it is occasionally wont to do. Ordinarily, I'm lucky, and it just barely reaches the rim, no further. But this time, the toilet gods could not be appeased, and my bowl ranneth over. All over the floor.

So I left for work, figuring perhaps I could rent a shopvac to take care of the mess. The rental place was on the north side of town, so I had to leave early to get there. Thankfully, Glen, my manager, was a nice guy about it.

So, I got up to the rental place, looked at the shopvac. It was bigger than I'd expected--and the rental fee was $15. Ouch. I decided not to rent it, and go with solution B--cheap towels, plastic bag to hold the enmoistened cloth, and laundromat. "You came an awful long way for nothing, then," said the rental guy--I'd called him from the cell on the way for directions, and mentioned that I was coming from the south side of down.

And so I decided that it would not be for nothing after all; I headed on north to the Northtown Mall and the Kmart therein. I bought four cheap bath towels (at $2 each), and two of those twisty fluorescent screws-in-to-replace-your-incandescent-bulb lightbulbs--I'd always wanted to try those.

Then I headed over to the northtown mall, to look at where an art shop had used to be. A few months ago, I bought a quite nice unicorn print there--the one that hangs right next to my blue bookcase. (I have a picture of it in an old LJ entry, but I'm not gonna bother hunting that up, or re-linking to the pic on my room pics page. I'm lazy, sue me.) At the time, the place had supposedly been closing up, and I hadn't gone back since then--but then I figured what the heck, maybe the shop's still there and under new ownership. And anyway, I was in the neighborhood.

To my surprise, not only had the shop not closed, it had expanded. It now occupied three shop sections of the mall instead of just one, and had almost every square inch of wall covered with hangings. There were framed pictures of every size, a bunch of movie standup art (including an Austin Powers figure with a motion sensor, who would say "Yeah, baby!" or "Shagadelic!" or whatever when you walked past him). I looked at all the unicorn art and other pictures, and ended up buying the rather nice jaguar print that you see at right.

After that, I suddenly realized--I didn't have anything I could use to hang the picture. After looking for a hardware store whose address was nearby but whose phone number had apparently been disconnected, I finally gave up and headed the rest of the way across town to a Hobby Lobby, where I could get a picture hanger kit.

Just now got home, and found it was just as well I didn't rent the 'vac; in the intervening hours, the floor had mostly dried, and it only took one of the four towels I got to finish it. I replaced the incandescent bulbs with the fluorescents, and ganged a hanger into the wall for the print; it looks quite nice up there. So, now I get to relax, fill my empty stomach, and decide what else to do with the evening. Yay me.

(no subject)

These fluorescent incandescent bulb replacements are kinda neat. It's a little odd, though, flipping the switch and only having the light come on about half a second later.